“No amount of coffee, no amount of crying, no amount of whiskey, no amount of wine…”

So, I fell in love and fell off the face of the Interwebs for a while. It was wonderful, but my feelings seem to have outlasted The Editor’s. I felt it coming, and tried my best to ignore it, but she is simply not in love with me anymore. To deny that I knew this would have been torture for us both, so I started a conversation this morning that I really didn’t want the answer to. It was one of the very few times in my life that I’ve wanted to be wrong. God, how I wanted to be wrong.

Reading the entry before this is hard, because it reminds me of exactly how wonderful things were in the beginning and how amazing it felt to fall in love with The Editor. It seemed as if she’d always be there to catch me, until one day she wasn’t. I tried to convince myself that it was okay, that I could give her space and time to figure out whatever it was that was suffocating her mind, but it was me. Me, my feelings, my love, my need for her love – it all overwhelmed her.

I am trying my hardest to keep myself pulled together. We parted this morning as adults who love and care for each other, but I’ve never dealt well with being the one who loves more. It just never seems to work out in my favor. And that leaves me angry and empty and helpless. I don’t deal well with feelings helpless, but that’s really the only feeling left to me at this point, other than feeling completely empty.

My karma has a very short cycle. Dating J was the process that prepared me for Crazypants and all of the self-assessment that came with it. Dating Crazypants was an almost-two-year learning process that apparently prepared me for this. I hate to say it, but it seems as if things do indeed happen for a reason. I know how hard it was for me to leave Crazypants. When we were breaking up, all I wanted was to comfort her, to not be the person who was breaking her heart and rebuffing her love. But at the same time, I wanted freedom from having to make her (or anyone else) happy. Because I loved her and wanted nothing more than her happiness, but I didn’t want *her*. And, from what I can tell, that’s pretty much how The Editor feels about me.

I know that things always come full circle, and it seems selfish to say it, but I wish I had had a little more time. I wish I had been able to steal a few more perfect moments with The Editor, because she is amazing and incredible and brilliant, and I miss her already.

 

It’s a little, It’s a little luck, It’s a little, so what?

Midnight, and I pick a tiny rose on the walk from Kendall to her condo. It’s hidden in my hand as I walk up the stairs, and after we step apart, she points to the giant vase of lilies on the sideboard. “For you,” she says, “I hope you like them”. They are my favorite, but she doesn’t know that, and somehow that makes me like them even more.

I stand there with my tiny white rose and I hold it out to her with a hesitant smile. “For you”, I say, “I picked it on my way here”. And she holds it to her nose, eyes closed, and smiles. “It smells wonderful. You are wonderful”, and then she tucks the tiny rose into the vase with the giant lilies and kisses me.

 

*   ~   *

 

Rachael Yamagata – Saturday Morning ♫

Mama’s got a brand new dong!

Or, at least, I will soon.

So, the backstory is that I entered a giveaway on Sinful Misadventures last week. I mean, they’re giving away free dildos, how was I supposed to just pass that by?! And now, the femme who has never won anything before in her entire life has won a brand-new cock from Eden Fantasys! Fuck yeah!

Here are some of the cocks I can choose from. I’m feeling a little overwhelmed, you know, in that totally-super-excited kind of way. I’ve been hemming and hawing about buying a new dildo for a while, and now it looks as if the universe has gifted me with one.

So, follow Sinful Misadventures on Twitter (@QueerieBradshaw) and like them on Facebook (facebook.com/sinfulmisadventures). And then head on over to Eden Fantasys and buy yourself a new toy!

And, once I receive my new toy, you can be sure that I’ll dedicate a post to the first *ahem* test run with it. (wink-wink, nudge-nudge)

Thanks again to Queerie Bradshaw, Sinful Misadventures and Eden Fantasys for adding a new toy to my bag of tricks!

It’s a small, small world…

So, in the last 6 months of on-and-off dating on OKCrazy, I have somehow gone on dates with 3 people who all have an ex in common. One is Brain Tumor Girl, one is The Jersey Boi and one is a girl I’ll call The History Teacher. They have all dated/hooked-up with with the same girl. And they’ve all gone on dates with/dated me. Also, I just found out today that one of my Twitter* friends had a fling with the same Clingy Butch that I did, only a few months apart.

So, is this a thing now? Did nobody tell me that this was a thing? Am I the only one who hasn’t had to deal with so much lesbiancest before?

I mean, I’ve definitely had the Degrees-Of-Separation talk with just about every lesbian I’ve ever met, but those conversations let me take comfort in the way that sex connects Boston’s small queer community. Having had sex with someone who had sex with someone else who had sex with someone you had sex with… well, I’m not quite as invested in that (honestly, I got bored just typing it) as I am with someone who has humped 3(!) people that I have or have wanted to hump. It’s just different!

The one other time that this happened, I actually ended up being friends with the person who had dated two of my exes. It was amusing, like something out of a movie. Of course we should be friends! BFFL! We humped the same people, we were gay… we had so much in common! It fizzled a few years later when I wanted to date one of her exes (oh, the irony!). I’m not sure I can handle a repeat of that friendship. As much as I’d love a queer BFF, I just can’t deal with the potential fallout. I’m getting too old for this!

The other thing that has come up when I’ve told this story to people is that they say, “You should date that girl (who also dated those other people you dated)!”. To which my reply is: What?! Why on earth would I try to date another redheaded femme with freckles?

Wendy, my first girlfriend – my first butch! – said it to me and, I swear, if she hadn’t been in Portland, OR, I might have stepped on her foot with my stiletto heel. Do you not know me at all? The one and only time I dated another femme, my mother actually said, “She’s too pretty for you. You like girls who look like little boys.” If my Mom gets it, why can’t my friends?

But that doesn’t really address my main issue, which is: the lesbiancest going on in my life right now is creeping me out! I don’t like to share. I don’t like to be compared to other people (even favorably). I don’t want to wander through wreckage that someone I don’t know (but apparently have a lot in common with) left behind.

That nice former-Mormon girl that Wendy wants to set me up with is looking better and better every day. I’m willing to bet that I have a million degrees of separation from any lesbian that dares to live in Salt Lake City.

 

*Whenever I read “Twitter”, I hear it in my head as Hannah Hart saying “Twittah!” like at the end of MDK1

Rookie Mistake.

My internet has been wonky for the past week, but I finally MacGuyvered a fix and have regained access to my internet addiction!

I’m going to tell this story with as little identifying information as possible, because this girl ended up being a great new friend. It’s just that after telling the story over the weekend, I had to write this down.

Once upon a time in early 2011, I met an adorable hipster girl on OKCrazy. She wasn’t the genre of woman that I’m normally attracted to, but she was snarky and funny and smart and a worthy Scrabble opponent, so I went on a handful of extremely awkward dates with her.

After Awkward Date #3 (I think), we go back to her place and start to fool around. As we’re heading into heavy-petting territory, we both seem to be enjoying ourselves. I feel slightly like a 16-year old boy as we start to undo buttons.

And then it happens… Right in front of my eyes her face morphs from the borderline-ecstasy look to, well, the *other* look. She scrunches her eyebrows together as she looks at me and asks, “Um… Are you wearing a ring?”

Fuck fuckity fuck fuck fuck. Yes, I was wearing a ring. A big honking garnet on my middle finger. Fuck. What am I, an amateur?

Needless to say I remedied that situation post-haste and we continued on to the natural, yet ultimately still awkward culmination of things. In the end, I forgave her for her skinny-jeans-with-the-saggy-butt and ironic haircut and she forgave me for the cardinal lesbian rule of TAKE YOUR FUCKING RINGS OFF!

And that, my darlings, is a Class A Rookie Mistake.

“If I ever start to think straight, this heart will start a riot in me…”

This weekend was full of Feelings, with a capital F. Next weekend, I’m going to visit the only ex-gf that I’m still in love with, and coincidentally, the best sexual partner I’ve ever had, and so I’m sure next weekend will be full of Feelings as well. Since I don’t want to think about either of these things, I’m distracting myself by reading a week’s worth of Fark/Daily What.

Here are the highlights:

I would much rather be allergic to peanuts. Also, this article leaves me with so many questions!

These are the kind of people who think you can get HIV in a hot tub. This level of ignorance is shameful.

I really hope that my future mother-in-law never hates me this much.

You can kill someone in Scotland, as long as you think they’re a zombie. Sweet!

Obligatory kitten video

When my brother has kids, I’m totally teaching them to dance to Thriller.

 

And, in the spirit of Dear Abby:

Confidential to all straight men on OkCupid (where I recently resurrected my profile): I don’t care how pretty you think I am or how submissive you are or if you’re the reigning World Cunnilingus Champion – I’m still gay. THE ONLY DICKS I SUCK ARE CYBERSKIN. End of story.

Family Values

This week for a work project, I needed my mother’s help. She’s a seamstress and has a small shop in a strip mall in the town I grew up in. We’re sitting at one of her sewing tables, drinking coffee and she’s talking  about the Real Housewives of Somewhere I Don’t Fucking Care About when an older gentleman lumbers in with a bag in his hand, held triumphantly over his head.

“I have it!”, he announces proudly, “It’s real calf skin!”

My mother nods, obviously aware of what this means. Since he’s done displaying his trophy, he scans the shop. I’ve busied myself looking through jars of buttons to find one to mend my red shirt dress when I overhead him say, “Is that your daughter? She’s a good lookin’ girl!”

Mom thanks him and I keep up my deaf-button-sorter routine in the corner as he adds, “You know, I’ve got a son right about her age…” and my mother simply replies, “She’s a lesbian.”

The gentleman’s jaw drops a little and then he collects his receipt and tells my mother that he’ll be back in a week for his mending. After he leaves the shop, she turns to me and says, “Everyone seems to have a son that they’d love to marry you to. You know, if we lived in another country, I could have sold you a dozen times by now. “

 

Here’s wishing you a happy voyage home…

My Nana’s boyfriend died this past weekend. … That was a really weird sentence to write.

My grandmother’s beau passed away on Saturday. There, that’s better.

* ~ *

Last summer, my Nana almost died. (Very) long story short, I got shipped out to Phoenix to take care of her upon her discharge home. My 21-year-old cousin had taken classes to become a Medical Assistant, but she was deemed too young and unreliable to be sent so far from home. I was old enough to be trusted but still young enough that my mother, my aunt and my uncle could boss me around. Ah, family. Once it was announced that I would be the caregiver in the weeks after my Nana came home from the hospital, her boyfriend, Dick, called my aunt.

“You need to tell your sister not to send her dyke daughter out here. It’s disgusting and your mother doesn’t need to be around that”, he wheezed into the phone. <insert dramatic pause with labored breathing here>

One thing that I will always be grateful for is that my family has almost never acted like my gayness bothers or in any way affects them. One of my first girlfriends, that I dated for years, still drives from Albany to visit when Nana flies home to MA every few summers and Nana asks after that ex-girlfriend every single time I talk to her (sometimes more than once in a conversation), so I know Nana doesn’t have a problem with it. Before my Papa died, he didn’t let the fact that he was a lifelong Catholic and a staunch Republican get in the way of telling me, “Love whoever makes you happy. I just want you to be happy.” My aunts, uncles and cousins have welcomed all of my partners into our family. Coming out was probably the most painless part of my 10+ years as a queer. Obviously this man was picking the wrong fight with the wrong family. My mom lets gay boys give her glitter makeovers, for crying out loud! Fashion is not disgusting!

My aunt was tactfully icy to The Old Bigot (as we affectionately called him). She assured him that she would talk to the family about how best to handle “the situation”, though I can be sure he didn’t know she was referring to him. What followed was the standard Family Panic Phone Tree: One sibling would call another sibling and tell the story. Then one or both would call the third sibling, who would then call whoever (s)he hadn’t talked to yet and they would repeat the story. It sounds confusing, but if you’ve got an extended family of more than 2 people, you know what I’m talking about. After the phone tree died down and everyone had already agreed that they were going to roast him on a spit shaped like a giant dildo and feed him to cannibal homos in the rainforest, my Mom finally called me.

“So, you’re not going to like this, but Nana’s boyfriend Dick called you a ‘disgusting dyke”", she said, and as she heard me on the verge of exploding, she yelled, “It’s okay! It’s okay! Your aunt is taking care of it! I gave her permission to yell at him and you know how much she likes to yell!… You’re still going, by the way.”

I, of course, wasn’t about to let an 82-year-old man with more asbestos in his body than lung tissue try to dictate my relationship with my grandmother. Also, I didn’t have any choice but to go, my family would probably duct tape me to the plane seat if they had to.

After I had been there and my grandmother had been home for about a week, Dick called to ask if he could come over. Hopeful that my aunt had screamed some sense into the old fart, I told Nana that it would be the perfect opportunity for me to go out and get a cup of coffee and take a break. When Dick arrived and I answered the door, he grinned at me and held out a shopping bag. “I think someone left this on the steps for you”, he said, “Take a minute and open it.”

I sat in the front room on the sofa that my mother and I had moved to accommodate all the new medical equipment while he went into the living room to sit next to my grandmother and resume their nightly ritual of watching TV until they both fell asleep on the couch. Inside the bag I found a card and a half-gallon of butter pecan ice cream. The note inside the card was short and written with an unsteady hand, but it was an apology from a man who was practically choking on his pride. For the next three weeks he would show up religiously every night at 6:30pm, just as we were clearing away the dinner dishes from the table. He would bring me a present, some little chocolate treat or more butter pecan ice cream, and he would wink at me as I grabbed the keys to Nana’s boat of a car and sprinted out of the house. At 9:00pm when I returned, they would be in their respective spots on the couch and recliner, both with bowed heads, fast asleep. I would clink dishes and close drawers until the sound of my movement woke them and he would sit and get his bearing for a few minutes before wishing us sweet dreams and heading home.

Later, my aunt told me that she said to him, “That’s my family you’re talking about, and I don’t know about you, but we love our family no matter what. And we love who they love, no matter who that is. If you want to be a part of our family, you need to start acting like it.”

Thank you, Dick W., for showing me that even the oldest, most ornery and stubborn dogs can learn new tricks, especially for the promise of love and family. I hope you rest in peace and that you’re finally able to breathe easily.

 

Anchors Aweigh, my boys, Anchors Aweigh.

Farewell to foreign shores, We sail at break of day, of day.

Through our last night on shore, Drink to the foam,

Until we meet once more. Here’s wishing you a happy voyage home!

You are what you love and not what loves you back…

We are late-night talkers, J & I, never starting our conversations until the next day has slipped into place. We can talk about anything (crazy girls, sex, sex with crazy girls), but last night we talked about me. About where I’ve been and where I’m going and if I’m taking the right road there.

If you’re lonely, she says, That’s how you know you’re doing it right.

When I’m lonely, I reply, It feels like I’m doing everything wrong!

And so we talk about loneliness. She reminds me that at one point all I wanted was not to have anyone need me or depend on me for anything. That the loneliness replaced the overwhelming guilt of not loving someone else as intensely as they loved me. This is The Point, and I know it, but it doesn’t mean I have to like it. She reminds me that I’m actively working on filling the abyss in me instead of using someone else’s attention as a stopgap and that that’s a good thing, even if it’s lonely.

And then, scrolling through Allison Weiss’ Tumblr, I saw the Love Poem posted above and I thought, that – THAT is why I’m doing what I’m doing. I’m living my life this way in the hopes that I never have to have another morning of waking up and crying silently because I’ve fallen out of love with the incredible, amazing girl next me and I’m going to have to break her heart.

And, when you put it that way, I’ll pick sitting alone in my room watching Law & Order reruns while eating cupcakes and masturbating until my wrists hurt over a crying girl asking me But, why? any day of the week.

Daddy Issues

Between Sunday and today, I spent a lot of time reading the odes people penned to/about their fathers. I found my heart pounding with jealousy as I read about all of the wonderful memories so many people have with their dads, because, well, my memories just aren’t like that. My Dad is what people like to call a “piece of work”. And honestly, after the shit he’s pulled in 2011 alone, he’s lucky that I called him at all, even if I did end up just leaving a voicemail for him.

So, today I decided to try to rustle up more than the one token good memory I have of my Dad that I think is genuine/loving/positive. Sadly, this was a lot harder than those other bloggers led me to believe.

Anyway, I sat with it for a while, and then, iTunes shuffle did its magic and started to play Clapton. Well, Cream, really. Sunshine of Your Love. And I remembered being in my dad’s white Isuzu pickup, I was maybe 10 or 11 and my dad and I had a ‘thing’. Our thing was that my dad would put in a cassette and play a song, and I had to tell him the band, the song, and if it was CCR/Allman Bros/Any permutation of Clapton, I had to tell him the lead guitarist. There wasn’t really a reward for getting it right, it just meant we smiled a little wider as we sang along to our favorite songs.

The other memory is one that I tell people a lot, one that has become a fiber in the tapestry of stories I tell to people as they get to know me. It’s of a time when he handled something with uncharacteristic grace, and it’s a moment that I have always been and will always be grateful for.

At the end of the summer of my 20th year, I threw a big birthday party at my parents’ house for my best friend. I had spent my summer trekking out to Worcester to go to the 18+ gay club with my ragtag group of fags, hags and babydykes twice a week and hanging out at coffeehouse open mics the other five. At the beginning of the summer I had ditched my skirts in favor of cargo shorts and abruptly decided to shave my head. My father didn’t talk to me for weeks. It was the first time he had had a negative reaction to me being gay and I wasn’t sure what it meant. Eventually he began to make jokes about taking me to the barber with him. He even offered to let me borrow his clippers. So when my best friend requested that we all come to the party in drag, I had no idea what to expect.

The night of the party, I’m in the bathroom, adding more pomade and rearranging my spiky hair for the umpteenth time, when my Dad walks in and stands behind me. He picks up the tie that’s laying on the sink, and then, after flipping up the collar on my black button-down shirt, he drapes the tie around my neck. As he reaches over my shoulders to grab the ends, he looks at me in the mirror and smiles as he says, “You’re not the kid I thought I’d be teaching this to, but you’ll probably learn faster than your brother would.”

Not enough to cancel out the hurt he’s caused, but enough to make me thankful for the moments when he tries to be a Dad.